Mix salt and sugar in a bowl. Taste it. When you like the balance of salt and sugar, throw it on the (skinned) fish. Wrap it up in a napkin or plastic wrap and keep it in the fridge.

Take it out every day, cut off a little piece and taste it. If you like it to be more salty, leave it in there a little longer. If you like it to be more sweet, you can wash off the salt and add sugar.

Give it another day or so, and taste it every day. Pull it out when you like it. It's as simple as that.

SAN ANTONIO — One of the city's hottest culinary movements focuses on techniques that reach back thousands of years.

It's the ancient art of charcuterie, and it's in the spotlight now as the focus of the second edition of Charc Week, which runs Tuesday through Saturday. The inaugural event took place in 2012.

During the coming week, more than a dozen restaurants around the city are making their own sausages, bacon, ham, pâtés, terrines and accompaniments such as pickled vegetables, jams, preserves, chutneys and more.

“Chefs are definitely excited. It's an event (where) you can pull out the stops,” said the chef and owner of Restaurant Gwendolyn and Kimura, Michael Sohocki, who organized the event. “This is an excuse to put it into fifth gear. I think chefs enjoy that because it's a license to do something above and beyond what their usual product is.”

The only rule for Charc Week is that participating restaurants must make everything in-house. The results are as different as the restaurants themselves. The one thing that's the same is the price — $20 for a sampler plate or box.

At Gwendolyn, Sohocki's team produced items such as a mortadella with local pepitas instead of the traditional (and nonlocal) pistachios; bresaola cured in salt, red wine and cinnamon; and a pâté de campagne with mushrooms, to name a few.

Offerings from the Granary 'Cue & Brew are to include a ventreche, a French-style bacon; lamb chorizo spiked with cocoa nibs; and smoked rabbit confit; with accompaniments such as a beer mustard made from co-owner Alex Rattray's house-brewed brown ale and house pickles, said chef and co-owner Tim Rattray.

And over at Mixtli, where chefs and owners Rico Torres and Diego Galicia combine pre-Columbian and modern techniques on regional Mexican dishes, the team is preparing charcuterie boxes that include xonoconstle (a cactus fruit) jam, a terrine of butifarra chiapaneca (Chiapas-style sausage), chorizo, house-baked bolillos and huitlacoche (corn fungus) butter.

The different cured and dried meats to be offered this week have their roots in the ancient techniques of preserving meats with salt and smoke, which became an art in 15th-century France. The name itself comes from chair (meaning 'flesh') and cuit (meaning “cooked”).

The emergence of charcuterie as a local fashion is also a sign that restaurants and diners are becoming more sophisticated.

“I was surprised at how many restaurants are doing it,” said Bruce Auden, chef and partner at Biga on the Banks. “We have always done pâtés. It's a little more trendy now.”

Biga, by the way, is doing a beef tongue pastrami, duck rillette, mortadella, lamb ham and foie gras torchon, along with pickled vegetables and chutneys, depending on what's available at the farmers market, Auden said.

Although the range of products is something special and a great way for chefs to show their skills, there's a bigger message underlying these efforts: To think more deeply about food, where it comes from and how it's made.

“You know that the people who are making these things by hand from scratch are thinking deeper. That's what's important to me, the 'thinking deeper' people, because those are the people who are going to push forward the food movement in San Antonio,” Sohocki said.

But he hopes the week that celebrates handmade foods can prompt conversations that reverberate far beyond dinner tables.

“We have done a good job of gussying up all these handmade products, and now they have all grown up to become industries, and that industry has come out of the hands of regular people, and I want to see them get back in the hands of regular people,” Sohocki said. “I want them to take control of their food stuff, where their food comes from, how their food is put together and re-think the foundations of life.”